Imagine a huge scorpion the size of a baseball bat, scrambling over mossy rocks and around large, treelike structures before slipping into a nearby stream.That’s how a team of scientists describes what the largest ever known scorpion would have looked like as it prowled its environment roughly 415 million years ago in what’s now Great Britain.To arrive at this fascinating new understanding, experts revisited fossils that had been in London’s Natural History Museum for more than 100 years. Piecing together those specimens along with more newly discovered fossils allowed the group to form a more complete picture of an organism that was once thought to be a crustacean, much like lobsters and other shellfish.AdvertisementAdvertisementPraearcturus gigas was roughly 1 meter — a little more than 3 feet — in length, the scientists estimated in a study published June 2 in the journal Palaeontology.“That is a chonky-looking organism,” said Russell Bicknell, a paleobiologist and research fellow at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who wasn’t involved with the new report. “You would not want to run into this thing in a dark alley. It would be an absolute beast.”Previous work on the scorpion, first identified in the 1870s, had suggested that it might have been part of a group of crustaceans known as isopods. It wasn’t until the 1980s, as scientists learned more about P. gigas and related animals, however, that the field also began considering it may have been another type of arthropod, or an invertebrate with an exoskeleton and jointed appendages — specifically a scorpion.The study underscores the importance of revisionary science, said Elizabeth Dowding, chair of paleoenvironmental analysis at Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. She was not involved in t …
